


for the love of memories

by cassi0pei4



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Now Jossed, Originally Posted on LiveJournal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-04 04:38:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2946605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassi0pei4/pseuds/cassi0pei4
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To pass the time in Stormcage, River relives adventures. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Originally Posted June 1 2011, therefore completely ignores certain revelations from season 6</p>
            </blockquote>





	for the love of memories

_Not those times, not one line - don't you dare._  
  
The grey concrete of her cell walls seems almost crystalline in the glimpsed illumination of lightning.   
  
She had taught herself to do this ages ago, but she's never had quite so much time to practice.   
  
She lets her eyes drift closed as she slows her breathing, watching the five books Stormcage allows her begin to multiply exponentially, spilling onto row upon row of remembered shelves - wooden and metallic and twice her height - filling the basement floors of the university's library, going on and on and on across underground floors.   
  
She pushes herself deeper into her mind and can feel the air cool to the chilled temperature of basement archives, imagining the ten flights of underground staircases - the ones she'd trod so often she could have walked them in her sleep. Each marble step - they became metal after the first 4 flights, as though once she'd gotten to know them, they didn't mind being a little less than perfect - now lowers her into a new sensory remembrance: dry air, no sunlight for days, the thunderous sound of one's own breathing after hours and hours of nothing but silent page-turning.

She takes another step and can smell the cleaning solvent they used on the B floor and the fine clouds of dust that rose when she stepped between shelves no one had visited for weeks or months or decades.   
  
She tries to actually feel it and not just imagine. She can, when she tries. Reality and imagination are both only thoughts; why shouldn't her mind play between them, like a mistress with two lovers; she's married to imagination, but if pressed she'll admit she's flirted with reality on occasion.   
  
She loses track of real somatic sensation - are her legs crossed? has her arm gone numb or is it simply ignoring her? - and is only in memory. She blurs the shelves of the library and assembles the well-worn recollections of her first off-planet dig: the green-tinged, freshwater oceans; the migraines she'd get after diving 500 meters, the ones that always seemed to vanish the moment she found herself face-to-face with a new artifact, some relic of the space ship that burned through the atmosphere and simmered to the ocean floor centuries ago, a fragment of history that hadn't been seen or touched or moved in centuries. She imagines the wonderful feeling of releasing her body from the compression suit after hours and hours of constriction, the annoyance of taming her wet hair into something almost presentable when she ventured to the mainland.   
  
The lightening strikes again and she lets it carry her away from nights spent in a tiny cabin at sea to a summer thunderstorm on a planet she'd never heard of with a man who looked at her like no one ever had, before or since.   
  
She gently moves her calves against the fabric of her prison sheets to try and feel the water that licked at that same spot on her leg that day as she strode determinedly away from him.   
  
"River--" she tries to remember the strain she heard in his voice as he called out to her, but no matter, her remembered self stops him before he can continue, turning on the spot and glaring wetly back at his dripping form obscured by the near solid wall of falling water. She didn't raise her voice - she couldn't not for this - but somehow she knew he'd hear.   
  
"You scare me."   
  
"What--" but again she stops him. He's closed the gap between them now and she holds a finger up to his lips to silence him. Some part of her had wanted to laugh at his the expression he gave her then, that patented affronted-yet-amused quirk of his eyes and twist of his lips; instead she's takes a breath to calm herself.   
  
"You make me want to lose myself in you," and her chest seems to hollow with the effort of feeling those words, of recreating his the peaks and hollows of his fallen expression. "You make me believe that if all I had in the world was you, I'd be okay, better than okay even, and that scares me." His eyes softened then and he gave her that look, that look that made her follow him when they first met, that made her feel that somehow - maddeningly, terrifyingly - he knew more about her than she did herself.   
  
"River," he said, voice almost wistful, "You'll never lose yourself in me. I could never stand to lose you, period." And then he smiled, not a youthful grin but that infuriating, ancient, sad twinkle of his that she never thought a man who looked so young could even produce.   
  
That summer storm was the first time she ever kissed him, and the drops of rain almost resembled glistening tears falling down his cheeks.   
  
She lets herself flow in and out of memories now - brushstrokes of emotion sweeping sensory remembrances across her consciousness.   
  
She has a paper weight that she bought a few years back at a flea market on Alfalfametraxis solely because, if held in just the right way it almost recreates the weight of her gun in her hand.

(The real thing is confiscated every time she returns to her cell. She hands it over freely on return and promptly recollects it from the building housing prisoners' belongings every time she escapes - they house her rather vast shoe collection as well, but that's beside the point.)

She remembers the first time she ever fired it - she could never be said to have been a natural at everything - patience, for example, took a great deal of work - but that was something her body seemed to have been made for: anticipating ever altering trajectories, bracing against the welcome kick and thrust and power of each shot she fired, body tensed, every sense heightened, yearning for more. 

The remembered bitter taste of adrenaline in her mouth feels like a reprieve from the reliably monotonous prison food. She keeps the same chorus in the back of her mind, the mantra that nips at her heels to push her farther faster:  _they're just behind us_  - it doesn't matter who they is only that they are them and that the ground stays solid beneath her fleeting feet as she races side-by-side with him a blur of welcome blue up ahead.   
  
Once she can convince herself that she's feeling that soothingly invigorating hum, the TARDIS seems to wash into life around her, like bleeding watercolors on mental canvas: the orange glow that seems to suffuse skin with a sultry warmth that sinks in to the bone; the cool feel of the barely-worn, polished glass floor on bare feet - and bare backs and legs and hips; the whisper of the matrix teasing the edge of her mind with possibilities and proclivities, new dials she's yet to play with and brakes that have been left on once again.   
  
And him, always him, though her mind never quite seems to do him justice. She can fill in every line of his ridiculous clothes and every strand of hair but his face is never quite right - too old or too young, too loving or too cold. She can always remember the sound of his voice - the pitch, the timber - but his voice never quite matches his expression the way it should. Maybe it's because that her mind was never really able to accept that he was real - how could it possibly manage to realistically recreate that which felt unrealistic to begin with?  
  
Sometimes she blurs the timeline: she first remembers tousling herself dry, his eyes hotly following her every motion, and not her tingling nerves acclimating to cold water skinny-dipping, which properly came first; and she prefers to dwell on how they made it up to one another - the trips to favored places, the silent apologies in the vortex - rather than linger on the fights - though, when she's honest with herself, some of those are remarkably enjoyable to think about.  
  
She wonder's if this is how the TARDIS feels about time, as though it is happening and has happened and always will be happening, just out of sight, within the reach of a breath and a blink and a thought.   
  
  
Five years later to the day - give or take one or two or twenty, what does it matter in the end? - she cuffs his chin and handcuffs his wrist and is lit aflame by so many memories - too many memories for any one person to hold - not because of 4022 people need to be safe and not saved and not because she knows she's lost her Doctor - no, she does so for the love of memories.   
  
 _Not those times, not one line - don't you dare._


End file.
